Participatory Culture in a Networked Era: Chapters 6 & 7

CHAPTER 6

This chapter talks about people developing a political sense of agency and a "civic imagination." Jenkins tells about his own time of discovery in the 70s when he was a Trekkie.  The changes he wanted to see in the world were in part reflected on the show through its diverse crew. Star Trek fans advocated for further change, such as a LGBT crew member. Jenkins says he "forged my political identity and articulated my ideals for what a better society might look like" (154). Fiske later wrote about pop-culture influencing one's political identity.

The idea of participatory politics is interesting. Peer based and influencing public issues. Isn't all politics like that? I guess participatory just means that it is more inclusive, or that it involves connectedness through technology. YPP thinks young people engage in politics not just because of family, school, or mentors; they engage because of informal learning communities, including fandom or gaming. Example: My daughter got drawn in because of boys on social media. She doesn't care at all yet about politics, but wants to know the players and particulars so she can be participate in the conversation with her social group via group text. I guess it's a start.

When I read the words "different kinds of communit[ies] have used new media platforms and participatory culture practices to recruit, train, and support young activists" I immediately thought of the ISIS videos I saw. I know that's not what Jenkins meant to conjure up for his readers.

Ito is positive and realistic. I always like her sections. She says, "We really need everyday folk to step up and take on responsibilities in public life, whether it is by blogging, organizing, or funding. Its so important that youth develop the capacity for engaging in these ways" (159).

boyd talks about the student walkout in California and ends by saying they were dismissed and ignored. I remember watching that walkout on TV and reading about it in the news. I bet there are plenty of political movements that would LOVE being "ignored" that way, with robust national media coverage. I have trouble following boyd's logic.

Jenkins continues to talk about DREAM. He says "The Obama administration was trying to seem tough on immigration, and it actually deported more people in its fist term than the Bush administration did in eight years" (160). I'll need to triangulate that when I have a moment. Ultimately, Obama changed his policies, and the Latinx (Jenkins uses the term "Latino") vote was mostly for Obama. Not sure if he changed his policy because of DREAM or if his advisors informed him that Hispanics are often swing voters. Not sure how I feel yet about the term Latinx.

Civic engagement coming from "affinity networks." I think that's always been the case, but it's easier now with technology and social media and connectivity. I agree with Jenkins about student council. It's just a popularity contest, and the office usually has notumph behind it. A WoW guild leader probably does have more power.

Ito talks about transferability of skills. That is an issue dear to me, and I try to find ways in the classroom to ensure that students understand the skills they learn can transfer to other situations and can understand in what context they could be useful again.


Jenkins told the story of the rides at Harry Potter World that didn't accommodate all sizes of kids, basically because some kids were too big. I understand how humiliating that must have been for those kids. Not sure the answer is as easy as getting Disney to change the ride. The issues include public health and political pacs, and large corporations and FDA regulations. Making Disney fix a ride doesn't fix the problem. All those obese kids will be humiliated again elsewhere, and then die of preventable diseases. It is a tragedy way beyond a Disney ride.

Ito talked about ravelry.com. I love that site; it's a great community.

boyd and I agreed on something on page 172. She and I both like the Dove "Evolution" commercial. I show it in my HUM 101 class, because the theme is advertising and consumerism. Students love this, and usually only 0-1 in 27 have ever seen it. It's just 1 minute long. Students often go home and share this short video with others once they've seen it. Political?

Jenkins ends the chapter by asking us to recognize some of youth's cultural change as political change.

CHAPTER 7

This short summary chapter, written as a collaboration, discusses the authors' core values in participatory culture. They also discuss their political biases (in case we didn't notice?) and concede that politics and participation is happening on both sides of the political fence. They say participatory culture isn't about the technology, but rather about the shared practices of users. In the "Relation to Capital" section, I kept thinking of the book "Feed" by M. T. Anderson. I wonder if they've read it. They end by hoping their book will inspire conversation, debate, collaboration, and understanding.

Participatory Culture in a Networked Era: Chapters 4 & 5

CHAPTER 4

Ito talks about learning and literacy and focuses on out-of-school learning. She says learning and culture are inextricably tied. Learning should not be about filling heads with knowledge, but rather about belonging, participating, contributing. Her example using real-world math is good. I wonder if the guy measuring would have "gotten it" though, without years of background, however shaky, in academic mathematics learning in schools. Likely, he wouldn't have known how to read a fraction. I think you need both types of learning. A mini lesson to pour information into heads, and then practical real-world participation to use and learn the information.

When she talks about kids who learn because of their own interests, she is right that they will work harder to pursue their interests than to pursue a grade. But she also warns that this applies only to some kids, and says, "The youth who are learning in this way are not typical....Most young people needed support from parents, educators, or other caring adults in order to broker connections across settings." We need to learn how to best fill that role for the kids who aren't self-directed.

boyd talks about information overload, and says it's not easy to decide what to focus on.

Ito draws a comparison of calorie abundance to information overload. Excellent analogy.

Jenkins touches briefly on values and civility. Then boyd says:

What captures people's attention is often the most salacious, fearful, and gossipy content available. It's the junk food of content.

I agree with boyd. Problem is, you can't call anyone's content junk. It would offend, and the implication would be that you don't value their self-expression, therefore you are (fill in the blank). So how to we navigate Jenkin's question of values and civility, and boyd's discusson of junk? boyd says,

...social media democratizes participation, but is this what we mean or even want?

But this doesn't mean we necessarily need to enforce controls onto the web, or consider it "bad." Wikipedia, the authors feel, is considered bad in academia. My class uses it as a springboard for research, but I don't allow them to actually use or cite the page as information. I show them how to read for general knowledge and use the sources at the end of the post.

Participatory Culture in a Networked Era: Chapters 2 & 3

CHAPTER 2

This chapter is called "Youth Culture, Youth Practices." boyd starts by saying that youth practices with technology are not understood, and are assumed to be insignificant and same among all younger participants. She outlines how the terms adolescent and teenager came to be used. Parental fear has been an issue for generations, and the internet is the newest boogie-man. boyd considers research on youth practices to be activist in nature.

I agree with Ito about teen girls being on the cutting edge of mobile text and visual communication. All of the authors have so far advocated for youth's right to agency, creativity, and innovation. I agree wholeheartedly. None have yet discussed the obsessive and often undisciplined use of mobile text and visual communication by these teens. I don't need a study to tell you that teens use text and visual communications apps all day long, starting at 5:30 am and ending at 2:00 am. While the authors are vocal about not hindering teens use and innovation, they haven't discussed the need for minors to be guided in their habits by parents. They see almost any type of supervision as oppressive and stifling.  That's naïve. It is certainly not in the best interest of high school girls to get 3 hours of sleep because they lack the willpower to ignore their technology.

Participatory Culture in a Networked Era: Ch 1

CHAPTER 1

The book starts with some strong questions about participation, exploitation, commerce, and culture. It becomes clear quickly that the chapter is written with all three authors individually participating in the content generation of the text. It proceeds as a conversation might, each referring to the other. They spend a while discussing Jenkins's coined term "participatory culture." The example about the samba schools is particularly relevant. It seems Jenkins is the senior guy here, as Ito read his works as a grad student and boyd had him as a professor in grad school.

I agree with Jenkins that digital cultures are not necessarily "oppositional or resistant."

Even with very open, participatory cultures with low barriers to entry, people find ways for maintaining status and distinction.

Human nature, no?

boyd brings up the question of whether technology really offers participation for everyone, and then she decides it doesn't, and talks about agency, skills, connections, and status, among other traits. Henry agrees that while there are still obstacles, we are shifting towards more participation. danah says:

New sources of power, status, and control emerge and introduce new forms of inequality.

This was my point when we discussed the Jim Gray case in class. It's a matter of access. A student replied saying in sum that it's human nature to stick together, so the programmers stuck together to help their own. When that kind of thing happens by race or by class, hmmm, not so easy to accept anymore, is it? But when it's a group of computer programmers and scientists? New forms of inequality emerge. Some may call it human nature and others may call it crowdsourcing; boyd and I see possible problems that cannot be overlooked. I'm not suggesting that any of it should be stopped or regulated. Just saying it should be noticed and acknowledged.

I'd argue that participatory culture enables -- if not empowers -- disturbing practices alongside positive ones. I believe in participatory culture because of its potential, and I don't want to see negative outcomes or fears being used to justify centralized control or censorship -- but nor do I want the hopeful vision to gloss over or otherwise ignore the darker side of things.

boyd opens the discussion of individualism and addresses a question I used to use in classroom discussion at Essex. Because of both changes in technology and individual smart devices, are we able now to see, read, and listen to only things that support our own worldview? boyd responds to my question:

I want to believe that networks result in healthier communities, but I also think that they promote a form of egocentrism.

Andrew Sullivan warns in his essay "We Have Retreated into the iWorld" that society is actually becoming less connected and  more egocentric because we can choose at all times what to pay attention to. And that people will usually pay attention to what already interests them, what doesn't challenge them. He says, "Americans are beginning to narrow their lives."

You get your news from your favorite blogs, the ones that won't challenge your view of the world. You tune in to a satellite radio service that also aims directly at a small market -- for new age fanatics, liberal talk, or Christian rock. Television is all cable. Culture is all subculture....Technology has given us a universe entirely for ourselves--where the serendipity of meeting a new stranger, hearing a piece of music we would never choose for ourselves or an opinion that might force us to change our mind about something are all effectively banished.

boyd feels that most technology platforms are about enabling individual expression, and can then be used for collective action. Ito argues that opposing the individual and the collective is a Western idea, and Jenkins ends the chapter by advocating for a more participatory culture even though there is still much we "do not understand very well about dealing with the diversity of a networked culture."

Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: Chapter 2 and 3

SEEING OURSELVES THROUGH TECHNOLOGY

Chapter 2: Filtered Reality

Starting with skin tone bias and getting to baby journals. Let's see where this chapter goes. What do I start off knowing about filters? I guess in terms of photos, that the kids all know which filters they prefer, and use them on all their snapchats and insta photos before they post them. A filter is used to remove imperfections.

Baby journals. I have two of them. The first is chock full of notes, photos, and journal entries. The second, not so much. Third child didn't even get a journal. Who had time to write reflections and paste in locks of hair with all those babies?? The books are like the authors describe: written prompts, charts to fill in, spaces for specific photos. The Sprout Baby app sounds like overkill. Who needs all that info every day? Some moms focus a bit toooo much on baby.

Filtering out content: "Twitter filters out long form writing, requiring us to limit ourselves to 140 characters at a time." The idea that social media filters out certain types of people who aren't "neoliberal subjects" seems accurate and reminds me of my favorite YA book of all time, "Feed" by M.T. Anderson. "An effective neoliberal subject, Marwick argues, ‘attends to fashions, is focused on self-improvement, and purchases goods and services to achieve “self-realization.”" What a bore. No wonder social media doesn't entice me.

What is this emotional contagion experiment on Facebook? Is that ethical? Were the users aware that they were test subjects?  Yikes! Facebook filters our behavior...

Back to the baby journals. The authors say that we save the moments in photos that we think we are supposed to share because we've seen other baby books. I disagree. I think we save the joyful moments that we want to remember.  Why would I want to save and cherish photos of the sleepless nights and spit up on new clothes? It's ok to let those moments go. Are we acting to the logic of a filter? Maybe we just want to capture the important milestones, and the filter isn't the driver.

Photo filters. They make ya look better. "Seeing ourselvs through a filter allows us to see ourselves anew." SkinneePix, OMGosh.  Reminds me of DFW's bit in Infinite Jest about the video phone and how everyone used a filter, and then they started staging their surroundings, and then the filter wasn't enough and everyone had to buy masks and then prosthetic faces and bodies to use for videoconferencing. It was hilarious and eerily accurate, written 20 years ago. 

On skin tone bias:

Even today it can be difficult to take a photo of a light skinned and a dark skinned person together without losing all detail in one or the other face.

This is so accurate. My son wanted to show me a pic of him and "his boys" at a house party. But there were two pictures: a "black kid pic" and a "white kid pic." Because in one photo, you could see the faces of the white kids, but the black kids were just eyes and teeth. In the other photo, the whitest kids were like lightbulbs, but you could see the even the darkest black kids clearly.  So funny that the kids just know to take two photos of the group.

Chapter 3: Serial Selfies

The premise is that we need to look at feeds, not individual posts or photos.  Social presentation is cumulative. Kalina and Lee's projects do not sound appealing to me.  Let me look them up. Yeah, that type of project holds no interest for me. (Athought watching Hsieh's hair grow might be vaguely amusing.) Maybe that's why I'm not that interested in producing or consuming social media? It's the visuals I have no interest in. I like to read blogs... Rebecca Brown's video, on the other hand, was awesome! Maybe the notes and the purpose made it more relevant and less narcissistic/artsy. 

Ah, the profile photo. Stress! I have no profile photo on my account at NJIT, and they ask me about it every semester. Procrastinating. Used Snoopy here at Kean, and it's ok.

Photobooths are so much fun. Bald booth, fat booth, etc. The coolest photo booth was the one we hired for my husband's birthday party. It was a digital photo booth with a green screen and everyone could add backgrounds, props, celebrities. Huge fun for everyone to just play around in.

Jones' Self Segregation and boyd's White Flight in Networked Publics

Jones' Self Segregation: Why It's So Hard For Whites to Understand Ferguson 

This article talks about the divide between White and Black understanding of racial inequality. The problem, according to the author, is that Whites surround themselves primarily with other Whites:

In fact, fully three-quarters (75 percent) of whites have entirely white social networks without any minority presence. This level of social-network racial homogeneity among whites is significantly higher than among black Americans (65 percent) or Hispanic Americans (46 percent).

The author says that many Whites feel the issue of race has gotten too much attention. Also, he says that there are cultural values such as "law and order" versus "personal freedom" that cloud understanding and perception.

boyd's White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped 

American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook.  

Boyd determines that MySpace became known as a site for POC or people from lower socio-economic backgrounds, and that Whites decided to leave MySpace and preferred Facebook as a platform. She describes what it means that MySpace is considered "ghetto":

On the other hand, being ghetto refers to a set of tastes that emerged as poor people of color developed fashion and cultural artifacts that proudly expressed their identity....Those who adopted MySpace were from different backgrounds and had different norms and values than those who adopted Facebook.

Regarding the Whites, then, in that space: if the space does not reflect their tastes or values, why would they stay? Is it really fear, anxiety, and racism, as boyd describes, or are they chosing a space where they fit in to the expected cultural values and norms? Is it necessarily racism, or is it teens, both Black and White, choosing spaces where their own values are reflected and celebrated? I agree wholeheartedly with boyd that the issues she's discussing "reflect broader narratives of race and class in American society," I'm not sure everything can always be chalked up to racism.

She describes MySpace as being built around urban and music culture while Facebook was based on college crowds. Therefore, would it be surprising that each group chose to affiliate themselves in a space that fit their social values and aspirations?

Subculturally identified teens appeared more frequently drawn to MySpace while more mainstream teens tended towards Facebook. Teens from less-privileged backgrounds seemed likely to be drawn to MySpace while those headed towards elite universities appeared to be head towards Facebook. Racial and ethnic divisions looked messier, tied strongly to socio-economic factors, but I observed that black and Latino teens appeared to preference MySpace while white and Asian teens seemed to privilege Facebook.

boyd talks about how Whites stick together. Much later in the article she concedes that so do Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Italians, Irish, etc, down to every last clan, group, and tribe on the planet. It seems silly that we need a researcher to tell us this. Yet when she published about the self-separation of teens on the two sites, it sparked "outrage."

boyd makes a dubious claim. She seems to have a preconceived notion of constant oppression and inequality perpetrated by the powerful on the downtrodden, and then seeks to prove it. She says,

Teens’ fear of MySpace as ‘unsafe’ undoubtedly stems from the image portrayed by the media, but it also suggests a fear of the ‘other.’

I wonder why she is certain that they are undoubtedly swayed by the media and not by what they see of their peers and experience on the site? And while it may suggest a "fear of the other" to her, it may be that it is an environment where the "mainstream" kids who are not espousing urban or music culture don't see themselves fitting in, or aren't interested in fitting in.

By far, the most prominent explanation teens gave for choosing one or the other is the presence of their friends. Teens choose to use the social network site that their friends use.

Yes, that sounds much more likely. Glad she brought it up.

the flashy style that is popular on MySpace is often marked in relation to “bling-bling,” a style of conspicuous consumption that is associated with urban black culture and hip-hop. To some, bling and flashy MySpace profiles are beautiful and creative; to others, these styles are garish. While style preference is not inherently about race and class, the specific styles referenced have racial overtones and socio-economic implications. In essence, although teens are talking about style, they are functionally navigating race and class. 

And regarding the hip-hop aspect of MySpace:

For some, participating in this taste culture is a point of pride; for others, this genre and the perceived attitudes that go with it are viewed as offensive. 

But are those who find it offensive expected to stay, because otherwise they will be labelled fearful, anxious, or racist? boyd mentions the presence of different moral codes and deviant practices. While it wasn't the norm on MySpace, acting out sexually was more prevalent there than on Facebook. boyd talks about kids "forced to leave" MySpace by their parents, but she cites not one teen talking about leaving by force. It was reported to be voluntary and self-driven by each individual teen and his or her friends.

The parallel boyd draws between "white flight" from urban areas and from MySpace is overwrought, but certainly serves to forward her arguement. Spammers took over MySpace like street gangs? What, in this instance, prevented non-Whites from moving to Facebook?  She goes on to say, "Needless to say, the frame of “white flight” only partially works..." That's one thing we can agree on.

She concludes with

The internet mirrors and magnifies everyday life, making visible many of the issues we hoped would disappear, including race and class-based social divisions in American society.

Is it race and class based, or behavior and taste based? Yes, our tools only help us live our everyday lives, they don't necessarily change our souls. Race and class based social divisions exist in every culture in every nation and group. Whether powerful or powerless, every color, gender, class, and creed, looks around themselves, affiliates themselves with likes, and calls "other". Why do we keep expecting this aspect of human nature to just disappear? When it unfairly restricts certain groups, it must be addressed and corrected. But to call for its disappearance is naive.

Selfie Pedagogy I - IV

Selfie I
Starting with the first link, it is evident that academics have begun to follow and study online culture, particularly the culture of selfies. I was surprised to find an entire syllabus surrounding selfies as a university course. I thought it might be by a bunch of Californians, but that's not the case. The people spearheading the project are from all over the globe. And I got to see their selfies.

One great thing about the selfie project is the sharing. If it's going to be considered scholarly, you have to convince skeptics. The way to do that is to share what you've learned.

 “I benefitted from their syllabuses and their scholarship,” Posner said. “I felt I was entering into a community that had done this for a long time, and they were generous enough to share what they had learned.”

Selfie II

Marwick wrote a paper on the "duck face."

Marwick, the Fordham professor who shared the Selfie Course, talks about how people are able to disseminate information to a much wider audience than ever. Before, only celebrities or politicians had access to the media that we all now have access to. Also, she tries to study what leads to popularity on sites such as Twitter and Instagram.

...she resigned herself to accepting that there might sometimes be “no reason,” because “popularity begets popularity.” 

  “Whenever you have a topic that is intrinsically sexy, it gets a lot of media attention. Social media scholars have been looking at this stuff for over a decade.” 


Interesting that she collaborated on the Selfie Course through Skype discussions and google docs. I think that's pretty mainstream now.

As an “old school web geek” with a “year 2000 understanding of HTML,” she liked having “more freedom to put up my own site. WordPress is relatively unfettered, and I was lucky to have the infrastructure, so I didn’t have to find space on a university server or a commercial site, where we might have been more regulated in what we can post.”

"Year 2000 understanding of HTML"--that's me. Seems it served her well today. I wonder if I should put my hybrid course up on Wordpress instead of NJIT site. It will be MY course, after all. I can put it where I want it, no? Need to think through the pros and cons.

Selfie III

The Association of Internet Researchers wanted to bring scholarship to the selfie phenomenon, and wanted to use the writing of young researchers and/or bloggers who hadn't been published yet, because the work was not considered scholarly.

“There’s not a thing called The Media. I’m part of it.”

Terri Senft of NYU discusses camgirls, slut shaming, and girls' need for self-expression. Then she addresses political and civic engagement. She says pictures of the dead put a human face on issues.

Selfie IV
Concerning digital pedagogy and teaching selfies in the college writing classroom:

National and international news organizations have been reporting on his recent work at the University of Southern California, but unfortunately this coverage has sometimes reinforced generalizations about the supposed superficiality, narcissism, and anti-intellectualism of young people, stereotypes that he had hoped to dispel.

Mark Marino says his students thought that selfies were about narcissistic young women, but instead, he teaches about all kinds of historic and modern modes of self-representation. The assignments he did with selfies, Facebook, and Vine all include critical thinking and reflection. Oh, and his classes did netprovs. Cool. He uses the topic of self-representation as a springboard to talk about privilege and access and inequality.

Net Smart: Chapters 5-6

Chapter 5 starts by talking about small world networks and 6 degrees of separation. He went on to explain the bell curve and the 80/20 rule. Then he explains how social networks are changing society and analyzes different types of social network positions.

Rheingold insists that online networks are as robust as real life networks. Probably so, for him. Rheingold is online for a living. Therefore, he is going to get out of his networks exactly what he puts in. I suspect his online ties are stronger than most people's.

In this chapter, when he discusses Granovetter, he also outlines specifically how he goes about finding and interviewing people. I think we can therefore cross that question off our class list of what to ask during our Skype meeting with Rheingold.

Mozilla's White Paper and More

Mozilla's white paper gives a great introduction and overview of the purpose of Mozilla. (Why don't more organizations write white papers? Is that an "old" form of introduction? Or do we call it an "about" page now?) The Mozilla founders want to keep the web "knowable, interoperable, and ours." They are against silos and pages that don't share the source code. Established in 1998. That rang a bell for me. That was the year the department head at my multinational corporation thought the web was the wave of the future for communication and decided he needed someone on his personal staff who could read HTML code. So despite that I was pregnant and exhausted, he sent me during work hours to two courses at NYU: HTML Coding and Designing WWW. The classes were pretty much only geeks and computer nerds (and one pregnant lady who took a corporate limo in from Jersey and power napped at every break.) I had almost forgotten all about that experience until reading Mozilla's page. The design software we used then would be primitive now. I seem to remember Photoshop being cutting edge. Not sure what the point of all that was, but yeah, I can read a little bit of code. And the web and its users and makers were different in 1998.

Exploring, Building, Connecting. Mozilla's idea of web literacy is different from our idea of digital literacy at the college level, and what we've been focusing on in class and at the NJIT library. Digital literacy so far has meant knowing how to use and evaluate sources on the web. Mozilla goes much further than knowing and evaluating. That is captured in the "explore" section of their web literacy initiative. They move on to building, or writing for the web, and then connecting, or participating on the web. This pushes the boundaries of our digital literacy ideas.

Mozilla has tools that might be relevant. I need to check out popcorn (would that be better than Camtasia?), goggles (might be neat to fool around with code again), and the web literacy teaching kit on the teaching activities page (is there anything of value that I could bring to my classroom, or assign for homework?). Looking forward to Laura's discussion lead.

Net Smart: Chapter 4

Chapter 4, Digital Know-how: The Arts and Sciences of Collective Intelligence, was an engaging chapter. Touching on many of the same topics as Clay Shirky did in his book "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations" (which I thoroughly enjoyed), Rheingold discusses collaboration from the theoretical to the real life use of wikis. I was expecting to see a quote or two from Shirky, but there were none. Hmm...

The section about mass collaboration explained that as humans, we are wired to collaborate. He reviews self-interest vs. collective good and the tragedy of the commons. Elinor Ostrom's work on "institutions of collective action" was particularly interesting, in that she figured out what rules need to be in place for the collective governance and use of shared resources to succeed.

Himmelman's schema was well explained: Networking has low risk; coordination means that everyone must share info for mutual benefit; cooperation means sharing info and resources, and modifying activities; an collaboration means sharing responsibility and resources to take collective action towards a common goal.

Net Smart: Intro - Chapter 3

Rheingold's book "Net Smart: How to Thrive Online" is about using the web properly. The introduction starts by convincing readers that they need to read this book to get the most out of the web and to avoid the pitfalls of not being in-the-know.

Chapter 1 is about attention. Rheingold discusses the science of attention, how the internet erodes our ability to pay attention, and offers advise on how to be more mindful; how to pay attention to our intentions. He uses words like "compulsion" and "obsession" describing people's attachment to their online devices. He also mentions works I've already read by Turkle, Carr, and  Shirkey. I am surprised, after reading all those authors, that Rheingold chose a more academic and less conversational tone. Chapter 1 reads like a literature review, except Rheingold offers his opinion on everyone's work, including his mostly negative opinion of Carr, who I liked.

Chapter 2 is about Crap Detection. It's Rheingold's take on how to determine the ethos of a website. I like the CRAAP test, which is a well-known standard he doesn't mention in the book, but does on his blog. He also describes the best ways to search on Google or similar search engines. The section in Chapter 2 called "Tuning Your Crap Detector" included notes that led to some cool websites. Here are some I appreciated, and some not so much: